Still, he lifted his head again, something inside unwilling to concede defeat.
He blinked and drew a hand across his eyes.
Slightly ahead and to one side was a Mustang, so close he could see the rivets and the heat streaks from the engine, the canopy half blasted away, a red-stained scarf around the pilot’s neck, the man’s eyes above the oxygen mask.
Dunne stared. Castle. But the kid was dead. What was he doing here?
The conviction grew in Dunne that he was dying and the kid had come to lead him through the shadows to his eventual destination. He sighed. If that was the way it was to be, the matter was out of his hands.
He tucked his wing inside the Mustang’s resignedly, and with a dead man beside him and an unconscious maniac on the floor, he entered the fog-flying formation with a plane out of the past, not knowing where he was going and not caring, his mind frozen, until the pilot lifted a hand and pointed downward. Dunne took his eyes from the plane and saw a broad runway rushing beneath him. He cut the switches and brought the Cessna in on its belly, sliding and scraping along the runway. He was certain he was dead, but the only thing that concerned him was that wheels-up landing. It was a helluva way for an experienced pilot to arrive in heaven or hell, as the case might be.
He fumbled feebly at the seatbelt to get out to face whatever awaited him, but the effort was too great. He passed out.
When he awoke, he was staring at a dun-colored ceiling, dimly remembering being lifted and carried, hearing concerned voices, being pulled and jostled. So he was alive after all. How or why he didn’t know.
The memory of that Mustang remained with the freshness of a dream retained. What had it been? An illusion? Hallucination? Ghost out of the past? The product of a lively imagination stimulated by circumstance? None of those things could explain how it had brought him down through the fog.
He lay still, a hollow feeling inside, trying to find an answer if there was one.
A woman came into the room, tall, her hair cut short and touched with gray. Once pretty, her face had matured into smooth planes that gave her an attractiveness and dignity youth could never have.
She smiled. “You would wake up when I was out of the room. How do you feel?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
Stethoscope plugged into her ears, she examined him quickly. “I think you’re fine, Mr. Dunne. If you want to get it over with now, you have my permission.”
“Get what over with?”
“Talking to all of the people waiting to see you. You’re a hero, you know. Everyone wants to know what happened, and you’re the only one who can tell the entire story. All anyone knows at present is what little we were able to get from Mr. Turner, who spoke mostly gibberish before we wired his broken jaw shut and strapped him to a bed in the psychiatric ward.
“You were very lucky. The man killed three people, attacked the two policemen attempting to bring him in, and escaped in the fog. It was rather obvious that he killed the other man in the plane and almost succeeded in killing you before you somehow subdued him, but there are many questions only you can answer.”
Dunne closed his eyes. Describing what had happened up until the time the Mustang had appeared and led him down would be no problem. The question was — how could he explain that? He looked up at her. “If you had a story you were certain no one would believe, would you tell the truth or would you lie?”
She smiled. “Mr. Dunne, I’m old enough to know that there are many occasions when telling the truth serves no useful purpose.”
She was right, thought Dunne. What had happened concerned him and no one else. He alone would have to live with it and accept it for what it had given him — the chance to go on from here.
That, at least, explained why the Mustang had appeared — the payment of a debt held beyond time and understanding.
The rest was masked by fog deeper than that the Mustang had brought him through; so dense and vast man had never penetrated it in the whole of his existence. He wouldn’t even try.
The Dragnet Burglar
by Philip Haldeman
You had to watch Kenny Beal like a hawk. In 1956 he was ten years old, short and lean, fast at sports, fond of wearing colorful Hawaiian shirts, and a notorious cheater at Monopoly. In the middle-class district of the city where I stayed with my grandparents for the summer, he and I and a couple of other kids would sit outdoors on our large wooden porch, move little silver tokens around Go, occasionally end up in jail or miserably land on Boardwalk with hotels. Each of us had his own strategy, but Kenny’s was unique. Stealthily he would watch our hands, our eyes, the turn of our heads, and when he found us distracted by talk or laughter, would, like a praying mantis, snatch a gloriously orange five hundred dollar bill out of the bank and hide it under his stack of tens. If he succeeded, he’d wait until later in the game, then with a dramatic flourish reveal the money and claim he’d been secretly saving it for an emergency.
We’d accuse him in blasts of invective, groan our contempt, then wait for the hilarious quirk that would give him away, for in a textbook demonstration of the guilt-ridden personality he could not for the life of him look anyone in the eye while lying. Under the fuzzy lid of his blond crewcut he’d shift his gaze up and sideways as if tracking a fly and say with feigned sincerity, “I didn’t steal it, I had it before!” He’d look just off to the side or above your head. When he got caught, he’d make a joke of it. “Can’t blame me for try-ing.” His mouth would curve ever so slightly downward in a pose of mock-criminal sophistication, causing one to imagine an invisible cigarette dangling from his lip.
It was a great show.
Winning, money, and sleight of hand were the surface priorities of Kenny’s life, and his father was probably responsible. Kirk Beal was first and foremost an entrepreneur. Sometimes his thin frame, long legs, and copious head of straight blond hair could be seen on the sidewalk in front of a neighbor’s house, his favorite venue for discussing a potential enterprise. Most of it was just talk, but one year — I think it was 1959 — he came close to achieving immortality in the fast-food delivery business. And he might have retired a millionaire by age fifty if only he’d chosen a different kind of food to deliver. But instead of initiating pizza delivery in a major American city, he opened a phone-in restaurant called The Chicken Shack — then ironically bought an entire fleet of little red Italian Fiats.
The year of 1956 was especially significant for a different reason. In that year our neighborhood was struck by the Dragnet Burglar.
At the time I didn’t know there was such a person and therefore had no hint he might enter the life of anyone I knew. The story of Frank B. Harrison was an anomaly in (as they say) the annals of crime. The newspaper eventually described him as “a divorced white male in his late twenties whose most recent employment was as an aircraft-seat upholsterer at Boeing.” Photographs of him show a tall, fashionable, slightly brawny man with a peculiarly slanted middle-American smile and no sign of the dark, bitter emotions apparently resulting from an abused childhood. An alcoholic, he’d had to leave his home state of North Carolina to find work. His wife remained behind, and two years later she and Harrison were divorced.
In November, 1955, the Boeing company discovered that Harrison had falsified part of his resume and fired him. Embittered and out of work, he resumed drinking heavily — and also watching television (then a relatively new luxury). Heaps of broken glass were discovered along the baseboard of one of his living room walls. The plaster was cracked and smashed, apparently where he had been hurling bottles as soon as they were emptied. Around March of 1956 he took to the streets, trying to walk off his alcoholic urges. He wrote to his ex-wife in North Carolina saying that he was so tired after one of these long walks he didn’t even have the energy to open a bottle. “I he awake at night,” he wrote. “I do not know what will happen to me. Soon my money will run out, and there are no jobs for upholsterers within five hundred miles.”